Due in part to the increasing use of Digital Video Recorders (DVR's) and other commercial skipping technologies, advertisers are increasingly looking to alternative mechanisms for presenting advertisements to consumers. For example, many advertisers are increasingly relying upon embedded advertisements and product placements within television shows and movies. Likewise, interactive environments such as computer games are emerging as viable media for reaching consumers, and as a result, computer games often incorporate advertisements both within an without the computer game environment.
Many computer games provide interactive environments within which users take on the role of a character in the environment, and interact with other characters and objects displayed in the environment. While some computer games are purely stand-alone games, whereby all of the other characters and objects are computer-controlled, many computer games permit multiple users to assume the roles of different characters and interact with one another in the computer game environment. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG's), in fact, permit hundreds or thousands of users to interact with one another in the same computer environment.
Particularly given the increased realism of many computer game environments, the advertisements and product placements that may be envisioned within a computer game environment are as unlimited as may be envisioned in the real world. For example, some computer games allow a user to play as a character that is associated with a particular product or brand. Other computer games display billboards as might be displayed on a building or along a highway, or anywhere else where an advertisement might be found in the real world. Still other computer games provide product placement for particular products within the computer game environment, e.g., by displaying a soda machine for a particular brand of beverage.
In many instances, advertisements displayed within a computer game environment may be superior to advertisements in television shows, movies, and other scripted material given that there is often a greater potential to make a stronger impression on a computer game user. Whereas an advertisement or product placement in a television show or movie may be displayed for a few seconds in a particular scene, an advertisement displayed in a computer game environment may be displayed for a longer period of time, and a user, if interested, can often move or otherwise orient his or her display to view the advertisement in more detail. In addition, in many interactive environments, a user can actually interact with the advertisement in the course of playing a game.
Advertisers are also increasingly attempting to target and tailor advertisements to reach specific consumers. In many instances, the ability to target advertisements in movies and television shows is limited given that such content is typically viewed by large numbers of individuals. Computer games, likewise, may be purchased and played by large numbers of individuals, and as a result, the advertisements displayed by such computer games may not be particularly well targeted.
In many computer games, advertisements are hard coded into the game, and thus are incapable of being changed once a game is released. Other computer games, however, support the ability to dynamically place advertisements within a computer game environment. For example, platforms have been developed to enable computer game developers to specify locations in a game where advertisements will appear. Then, while a user is playing the game, different advertisements are dynamically inserted into the specified locations. Some platforms, for example, enable a computer game to access a central server and retrieve advertisements, thus enabling the advertisements that are downloaded to a computer game to be changed over time. Furthermore, some platforms track a user's interaction with an advertisement, e.g., to determine how long a user viewed a particular advertisement and whether the user performed an action associated with the advertisement. Such information may then be forwarded to a central computer and collected with similar information from other users for use by advertisers in determining the effectiveness of a particular advertisement or advertising campaign.
While dynamic placement of advertisements provides significantly greater flexibility for advertisers in reaching consumers interacting in a computer game environment, existing systems still provide only a limited ability to target advertisements toward particular types of consumers. A significant need therefore still exists for improved manners of targeting advertisements to users in computer game environments.